As a Nildram customer, things are getting somewhat confusing! Nildram owned by Pipex owned by Tiscali owned by ???. I'd say Vodaphone are a likely bet - they don't own an ISP yet while Sky do...

The whole "consolidation" thing that's happening is that the customers started voting with their feet. I suppose they're hoping someone will buy them out of the hole they dug with their bad business model, but from what I've been seeing, their share price (TIS.MI) is actually FALLING .

(Insult to injury...or maybe they have a pensions shortfall..????)

Ah well.. the moral of the story is, look after your customers, and they'll look after you.

As it's a friday , i would go out and party on this news alone, but i might wait to see if SCO makes it thru the weekend

that will make my life jumpering even easier!

When cable TV finally got off the ground in the UK there were loads of companies selling it. Quickly that number narrowed down and eventually we're left with a small handful of big players.

It's only expected that broadband goes the same way as the rest of services getting lumped together. I'm waiting for the next round of venture capitalist buy-outs which ends up with me trying to work out if I'm paying a French or German water company for both my gas and internet.

As usual the customers are praying that a takeover will improve services -- unlikely as they will become even smaller fish.

I'm not looking forward to becoming a customer of BTMicroHoo, myself.

These bloody idiots only bought Pipex a few months ago and now they reviewing thier strategic approach to the Broadband business? Do they even know what the word "strategy" even means?

Could Tiscali even *buy* a clue on how to run a business? Jee-ee-ay-zusss...

customer service thats considered a joke; not profitable; network clearly under strain... You couldnt pay me to run it as an ISP, although my previous offer of 2x crayons + milk is open, I might be able to make enough money out of selling the equipment for scrap to make it worthwhile.

I see that there are several different supplier names owned by Tiscali, and the news of the last few moths is that they're all on the same broadband infrastructure now. Pipex isn't an ISP, it's a customer list. And, I suppose, a domain name for customer web pages.

So will a buyer of Tiscali do the same?

Or are the alleged 2 million customers too many for anyone else to absorb cheaply?

If someone was to buy Tiscali, they'd be buying it for their customers rather than the technology or network.

Don't forget us Bulldog folk. Thus far we have avoided any of Tiscali/pipex network and been left with our nice fast uncongested, unfiltered, non-traffic shaped and uncapped connections due to it using NTL's backbone capacity and unbundled loop.

After them blocking Opera, I was enraged, but I'm lethargic so I gave them another go. Then I found that you can't used the full BBC iPlayer app with them. Final strike. I'm out as soon as I find a viable alternative and get my MAC.

Toucan Mobile piggybacks on the T-Mobile network, so maybe Deutsche Telecom will buy up to get a foothold into the UK market.

Not the first time the Germans have had to take over from a bunch of inept Italians...

This is good news for their customers, at the end of the day I personally consider Tiscali to be the worst ISP in the market.

Sure they have 2 million customers, a lot of them came from buying other isp's. They attract a lot of people who don't know any better by stupidly low prices. They have almost 0 customer service, their technical support is a joke (telling you to clear your temporary internet files to resolve a no sync issue on your router). Hell I even know for a fact that they have conference called other ISP's to get their support people to try and help their customers in the past. Add onto that the random blocking of so many thing's the web has to offer.

With any luck someone will buy their customer base and run the service properly, or at least offer the customer a get of from those contracts so they can be free to go to who they want to be with.

unfortunately, the company suffers from very poor management, beleive me, I know. as we speak we are setting up another call centre in the phillipines - if you think getting through to india is bad you haven't seen nothing yet.